LocalHackDayProject2018

We made a game called GravityBlock using the Unity3D Game engine, along with scripts written in C#.

The start of our hack was pretty rough. We first took a while to come up with an idea. At some point making an educational program was floated around, and a chatbot, but we decided the most fun idea would be one involving a game. So, we thought of games to make. We had a sense it would somehow involve wonky controls and/or wonky gravity, but we were unsure about a couple of the fine details. One, would our game be 2D, 3D, or a mixture of both (2.5D)? Two, was it a puzzle game, or maybe a platformer? The latter question was cleared up pretty quickly, we found that a platformer game would be easier to make, but we had quite a bit of difficulty with the first one...

So, we first decided to do a 3D game. Our block or ball or whatever would be able to defy the laws of gravity in all three dimensions, X, Y, and Z. But to be honest there was some confusion about even the 3D aspect in and of itself. Would we have 3D models and simply create the game in terms of the XY-plane (ignoring the Z-axis) so our game would _ look _ 3D but behave like a 2D game? Or would the ball be able to truly roam the full expanse of a true, depth-filled world? We flip flopped here and there, whilst creating our first level, and eventually ran into some errors. Specifically, git-related ones. One of us would push our repositories and the other would try to pull, and for the one pulling there would be some kind of error popping up. We deleted our local repositories, tried re-cloning, and a variety of other remedies but nothing was working. It was quite frustrating.

Well, the issue was finally resolved once one of us (Mo) realized what they were doing wrong with the desktop version of Git. The issue was resolved. And we also decided to completely switch from working with 3D models to working with 2D models. This was maybe a good several hours after the start of the local hack day.

After this came the renaissance of our project-building. We chose a crate as our character sprite, a picture of a void as our "portal" and got down to level-building. Andy programmed the physics and also came up with the idea of using squares to resize the character sprite, which he also programmed. Mo built level 1 and the starting and ending levels and created the scripts for switching levels. Andy created level 2 (the harder/hardest one) as well. That pretty much concluded our project.

It was Mo's first time working with Unity and Andy had a little prior experience, so we would say it's an okay enough project for such newbies like us. We hope y'all enjoy it.

Built With

• c#
• unity